Starring Cho Je-Hyun, Seo Won. Written and directed by Kim Ki-Duk.
(14A) 100 min. Runs Apr 15-21 at the Royal, 608 College. Continues Apr
22-26 at the Paradise, 1006 Bloor W.
Those who embraced Kim Ki-Duk's placid art-house breakthrough Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring last year may regard Bad Guy
as a startling departure but it's actually an older film, having
premiered at the Toronto film festival in 2002. It's being released now
to capitalize on the hype surrounding Chan-wook Park's Oldboy, another
highly touted Korean thriller (see On Screen this page). Both are about
the arbitrary imprisonment of an oblivious victim but Bad Guy decides to stay with its antagonist.
That
would be Han-Gi (Cho Je-Hyun), a low-level pimp who never speaks,
probably owing to the ugly scar he sports across his throat. In the
shocking opening scene, he spots pretty student Sun-Hwa (Seo Won)
sitting on a park bench, every inch the embodiment of what he can't
have. She rebuffs his clumsy advances but when he forces her into a
desperate kiss, he's pulled off and brutalized by a group of passing
soldiers. The girl punctuates his humiliation by spitting in his face
and walks away with her boyfriend, secure and untouchable.
Except that she's not. To reveal Han-Gi's elaborate revenge would dull Bad Guy's
overwhelming emotional impact: it's enough to say that Sun-Hwa suffers
a protracted punishment at the thug's hands that is both wildly
disproportionate to her perceived crime and very difficult for even
jaded viewers to stomach. But Ki-Duk doesn't revel in the details of
her suffering. For all the lurid nastiness on display, it's clear that
the film is meant as an exploration of cruel male fantasies rather than
a smiley-faced enactment of same, à la Sin City.
In fact,
this inventory of cruelty is unfailingly compassionate. It's a curious
dynamic made all the more disorienting by a third-act detour into
surrealistic territory.
Bad Guy delivers the requisite genre
jolts (there's an impaling with a five-foot long shard of glass) but
the atmosphere of fateful melancholy is what will linger in your mind
for days.